Do you remember the iconic Atari computers from the 80s? They were revolutionary for their time and paved the way for modern-day computing. However, did you know that there’s a surprising connection between the Atari serial port and the ubiquitous USB ports we use today?
Back in the day, Atari computers used a serial port called SIO (Serial Input/Output) to connect to peripherals like floppy disk drives, modems, and printers. The port itself was called the “Serial Port', but I'm sticking to referring to the whole system as "The SIO” for convenience.
The SIO port was designed by Joe Decuir, a brilliant engineer who played a pivotal role in shaping the world of personal computing. Unlike other systems at the time, the SIO was “smart" and could recognize various peripherals daisy-chained together to the computer.
With a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, Joe Decuir was a principle engineer at Atari from 1975 through 1978. While he worked at Atari, he helped design the Atari 2600, and of course, he developed the serial input/output system for the Atari 400 and Atari 800 computers. Following his years at Atari, he worked for Amiga Corporation, where he helped design the Amiga computer - and then for companies such as Apple, Silicon Graphics, and Hewlett-Packard.
So, let's jump to the 1990s when a group of companies, such as Intel, Microsoft, and IBM, were working together to develop a new standard for connecting peripherals to computers. The goal was to create a technology that was faster, more flexible, and easier to use than the existing serial and parallel ports. The result was the Universal Serial Bus, or USB, which is now an industry-standard interface used by billions of devices worldwide.
But what does this have to do with the Atari serial port? Well, it turns out that the design of the USB protocol was heavily influenced by Joe Decuir’s work on the SIO port. In fact, Decuir is often credited as a major contributor to the development of USB.
As mentioned previously, the SIO port was way ahead of its time and provided many of the same features that we now take for granted with USB, such as plug-and-play connectivity and support for a wide range of peripherals. It even had its own version of a device driver model, allowing peripherals to be automatically recognized and configured by the computer. In many cases, this meant that the peripherals themselves had to be smart, to communicate with the computer; generally using a MOS 6507 chip and associated coding.
In conclusion, the Atari serial port played a crucial role in shaping the world of computing as we know it today. So the next time you plug in a USB device, remember that you owe a debt of gratitude to the groundbreaking work of Joe Decuir and the Atari SIO port.
